


Pretty Rocks

by lirin



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Canonical Character Death, Ring of Barahir, Worldbuilding Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:42:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23425702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: The Lossoth may not have seen value in the jewels that Arvedui had offered them—but after that time, they saw that even a rock so small and inconsequential might sometimes have value.In which a little Lossoth girl goes digging for pebbles, and her granny tells her of past pretty rocks.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2020





	Pretty Rocks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tanaqui](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanaqui/gifts).



**Translator's Note**

This is an excerpt from a volume of unknown provenance that had found its way to the library at the Undertowers, where the Wardens of the Westmarch make their home. In the comparative peace that followed the dawn of the Fourth Age, trade flourished, and it seems likely that some trader must have made their way to Forochel and brought it back, knowing that books were valued at the Undertowers and would bring a decent price.

Much the same approach has been taken to translating this piece as was taken by the translators of the account of the War of the Ring as given in the Red Book (which is still the Undertowers' most prized possession). To wit: "the whole of the linguistic setting has been translated as far as possible into terms of our own times". One word that presented particular difficulty was the one rendered "Granny". This does not literally mean mother's mother, but still implies some close non-familial relationship. The most likely possibility is that "Granny" held the role of a midwife, present at the children's births and at the births of their mothers before them.

The book appears to have been written by Ela herself many years after she had herself reached adulthood. Much of the rest of the volume's contents are an illustrated guide to herbs and other medicaments, perhaps indicating that Ela became a "granny" herself.

**The Tale of the Pretty Rocks**

The children were gathered around a hole in the snow. They had been digging there for hours, while the adults and older children were about their work. Snow piled high on every side, and now dirt and stone joined it too, as they dug ever deeper.

"Mama!" one of the littlest ones called. "No, it's mine, I found it!" She ran as fast as her short legs would carry her, until she reached the campfire and clung to her mother's furs. "Mama, see what I found!" She extended a grubby palm with a small rock in it, no wider than an adult's thumb.

Her mother stopped stirring the pot before her, and turned to the little girl. "Ela, that's a rock."

"Yes, mama, it's a pretty rock."

Her mother looked closer. "Yes, I suppose it is pretty. It has several colors running through it, instead of being all one color like the stones that we used to build the summer-buildings. But it's still only a rock. What can you do with it?"

"I can look at it," Ela said. "Granny, don't you think it's pretty?"

Granny was the oldest of the people in the village, and all the children looked up to her as if she was their grandmother, though she had never had children of her own. She climbed slowly to her feet and walked over to the little girl, leaning her weight heavily on her cane of wood that had washed in from the sea in summer. The other children gathered round them, waiting to hear Granny's verdict.

Granny looked at the rock for several breaths, then spoke with authority. "It is a pretty rock, if you like your rocks to be pretty," she said. "There are strange folk in the south, who like pretty rocks, though theirs were even prettier than this one is. When I was a girl, no older than any of you, I remember—well, I might as well get comfortable first." She walked back to her seat. It was the closest to the campfire, as she was the eldest. The children followed her eagerly; Granny always told the best stories.

Ela pushed her way to the front, and the other children gave way before her. After all, it was her rock that had gained them this story, even if she was the littlest. She sat down on the ground right in front of Granny and waited for the story to begin.

Granny sighed and set her cane across her knees. "When I was a little girl," she said, "strange men came to us, out of the old dwarf-mines. Now, I did not see them for myself, as I was at home in the summer-village, but my father and his father and my older brothers were there in the snow-camp, fishing through the ice the same as your fathers and brothers are doing today."

"Were the strange men from the south?" Ela asked.

"They were indeed. They were strange men with strange faces and metal garb. They asked for help, but they did not have any dried fish or flatbread or sea-salt to give for payment. Indeed, they had no food at all, not even for their own needs, and so my father was kind enough to give them some of the fish he had caught. In return, their clan-leader offered him a pretty rock, no bigger than the one you hold now. Something fit only for children to play with, my father called it when he told us the tale afterwards."

"What did he do with the pretty rock? Do you have it?"

Granny laughed. "He told the clan-leader to keep the rock. He had no need of such things, and the man obviously needed it more than he. But that is not the end of the story! The strange men sheltered there on the shore, and waited. It was almost as if they knew someone was coming. My father realized then that the rock had great value after all, to call such a thing to them from the sea. For one day, a monstrous wooden sea-sledge came there, into the bay!"

"A sea-sledge?" all the children chorused.

"Yes, a sea-sledge," Granny said. "It carried people as our sledges do, but it was much, much bigger, and it could travel across the liquid water and not just on ice. In fact, it could not travel over the ice at all, and my father and brothers had to carry the clan-leader and his men out to the sea-sledge in our own normal sledges."

"And then did they leave and take their pretty rocks with them?" asked Ela, clutching her own pretty rock tightly.

"Yes, they did leave," Granny said, "and they did take their pretty rocks with them—all but four very small ones! There were four tiny green rocks that the clan-leader wore on his finger. They had used metal to fasten a casing for them so that he could keep them there on his finger for always, instead of using the metal for knives or anything more useful. When he left, he gave the finger-rocks to my father's father. He insisted that they had great worth, but no power or virtue. But my father's father did not believe him, and neither did I. For as soon as he gave up the rocks and departed on the sea-sledge, a terrible storm arose and tore the sea-sledge to pieces. For this was in the days of the terrible Snow-king who controlled the snow and the frost with his voice and his whims, and once they had given up the finger-rocks and set out on the great sea, they had no protection against the Snow-king."

Ela sniffled. "Did the Snow-king take them because they were bad? Mama says that if you're bad, the Snow-king will come and take you away."

"I don't know if they were bad or good," Granny said. "I only know that the Snow-king's storm broke the sea-sledge into a thousand pieces, and the southern clan-leader and his men and the rest of his pretty rocks were never seen again."

"What happened to the finger-rocks that he gave to your father's father? Do you still have it? Can we see it?"

"That's the last part of the story," Granny said. "When my father's father died, he gave the finger-rocks to my father. And several years later, after all my brothers were married and after the Snow-king had disappeared from our lands, one day there came horse-men from the south. They gave us plentiful stores of smoked meat and sugar and rare spices, and in return they asked only the return of the clan-leader's finger ring, for they said he had been their leader and they had nothing else to remember him by. We ate well that winter, and the winter after that as well. And all for the sake of some pretty rocks." She reached out and wrapped Ela's little hands in her old gnarled ones. "And so you see, Ela, and you too, Vyr"—this to the girl's mother—"that there can sometimes be a use for pretty rocks." She picked up her cane, and pushed herself slowly to her feet. "But there is even more use for good food, and that is what your mama has prepared for us now. So go put your rock away and scrub your hands with snow, and let's taste your mama's stew. I expect it will taste almost as good as the stew we ate in the year when the horse-men came."

Ela did as Granny said, and her rock sat on top of the fireplace in her family's summer-home for many years afterwards. Other rocks joined it season by season, until she grew too big to play with the little children and had no time to dig under the snow for rocks. Some of the rocks were bigger, and some of them had more colors in them. But she never found any quite so pretty as that first rock that she had held in her hands as she listened to Granny's story.


End file.
